Pangayawan Elementary School

Three of the four classrooms in Pangayawan Elementary School in Misamis Oriental were already old and frail when the Surigao earthquake of May 2017 hit. The disaster left classrooms in desperate need of repair, or in extreme cases, out of order. Sadly, this was to be expected of the school’s classrooms; the four existing classrooms at the time were all built in the 1950’s and are of the wooden gabaldon type. Moreover, the location of the school is not ideal. Because it is situated beside an elevated national highway and surrounded by hills, the school has become a catch basin prone to flooding. 

The school tries its best to meet the demand for education in the area, but certain limitations prevent it from accommodating all students. For example, the school has to fit 174 students with only 90 working chairs. 

Pangayawan Elementary School currently has seven working classrooms, three of which were made possible by HOPE. “The learners were given the opportunity to learn in a good classroom environment,” one educator said. Aside from being a recipient of the three classrooms, Pangayawan Elementary was also part of the Safeguard Hand-washing Program of 2019, which has the primary goal of reducing student absences by teaching proper sanitary practices. The program works by recruiting at least 50 HOPE classrooms across Mindanao who, in exchange for teaching the students the Safeguard hand-washing method and documenting it, will receive 1,000 Safeguard bars per classroom. The school will then monitor the students for six months on a daily basis and report whether or not absences due to sickness were lessened.